Mr. Speaker, no one has ever suggested that any one particular sector by itself, even if it was completely removed, could meet the Kyoto target. To me, this is kind of a straw man set up by the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters or anybody else who simply does not want to engage in the kind of change that is required in order to prevent climate change.
In the end, those people's children and grandchildren are going to live in the same screwed up environment as the rest of us. Why can they not see that? Why are they caught in this paradigm paralysis that they cannot see beyond the way they have always done things to see that we have to change our way of doing things instead of coming up with these rather petty reductio ad absurdum arguments that are supposed to lay us to waste. We are supposed to listen to them and say, “Oh, wow, let us forget it then. Let us just go on doing things the way we have been doing them”.
The fact of the matter is that we can meet our Kyoto commitments by having the kind of comprehensive plan that the NDP itself has put on the table. It is a combination of things, from very simple things like having a tax system that would allow people to deduct the cost of their bus passes, to massive retrofitting of buildings, to building the east-west hydro grid that has been waiting to be built for so long, to getting serious about public mass transit. The list goes on of things we could be doing. We could invest in renewable energy, solar and wind power, instead of continuing to subsidize the oil and gas industry. No one thing is going to do it. We need to do all these things together.
To do that, we need to have a government that has the will and a government that has a plan. So far we have neither.